Forgive my ignorance,I tried to google for answers,thanks in advance!!

Hi Battygurl,

Good question!

First, for the sake of discussion, let's assume you are on a corporate network - for a company named XYZ. The Internet website would be something like: http://www.XYZ.com. Within the Intranet (internal network of the company), your computer is given an identifying name, say: battygurl, so your hostname on the Intranet would be: battygurl.XYZ.com, and it would be given a specific Intranet ip address with which it would be associated. Then if battygurl were also your user account name, then your email address on the Internet would be: battgurl@XYZ.com and XYZ's internal software would be able to resolve from your account that when you retrieve your email, it is delivered to your computer named battgurl.XYZ.com to the email account named battygurl.

DHCP or Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol works like this: for each session that a computer comes up on a network, it doesn't know its TCP/IP address, so it broadcasts to the entire segment its on once to say "I need an ip address" which the DHCP server on its segment supplies. DHCP reduces the number of duplicate ip addresses on a network. In the good old days, administrators used to assign internal ip addresses, and as a consequence, duplicate ip addresses would occur - due to human error.

The ip address in effect is leased for the session. When the lease runs out, the workstation software must broadcast again for an ip address.

Your computer's hostname is associated with the ip address. WINS or other server software running on the internal network resolves your computer's ip address and other remote computers ip addresses vs their hostname. Its all TCP/IP related.

You can open up a command prompt window and execute the command: hostname.exe
to find out its name. In the example above, it would, of course, be: battygurl

In Linux/Unix, to set your hostname involves two things:

1. "hostname <whatever>" to set the hostname for the current session, and
2. The "HOSTNAME=" line in /etc/sysconfig/network

-- Tom

__________________ The independence created by philosophical insight is - in my opinion - the mark of distinction
between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth. - Einstein 1944
Imagination is more important than knowledge. - Einstein

I believe DNS hostnames resolve Internet domain names for hosts with names to route Internet traffic accordingly by the major components of the ip address, and hostnames and Intranet hostnames are resolved otherwise by the internal DHCP, WINS or other name servers keeping track inside the Intranet to route the traffic internal to a network within the domain - if I am not mistaken.

For example, 217.205.4.69 would identify the company as the first two numbers assigned to the company, the 3rd number would identify the 4th subnet within the company, and the last number would identify a particular workstation on the 4th segment, i.e. identified by 69. My point is that DNS servers would only be interested in the first two numbers of the ip address in order to route any communication around the Internet to/from the workstation.

So, in short, for us Windows amateurs, the DHCP Hostname is what is termed "Full computer name" on the Computer Name tab of My Computer Properties. At least, that's the name that was shown when I executed 'hostname' in a Command Window. Thanks again.

So, in short, for us Windows amateurs, the DHCP Hostname is what is termed "Full computer name" on the Computer Name tab of My Computer Properties. At least, that's the name that was shown when I executed 'hostname' in a Command Window. Thanks again.

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